Welcome to the National Income Dynamics Study

The National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), is the first national panel study in South Africa. The Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) based at the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town is tasked with implementing this survey. More of our details can be viewed on our channel here.

Announcements

A new release of the NIDS data is now available. This release addresses 2 main issues affecting the weights variables, w’x’_pweight in the indderived data file and the w`x’_wgt in the hhderived data file (`x’ is the wave number). The issues are as follows:

1. Missing panel weights for some babies born to CSM mothers after Wave 1 (2008).

We recommend that users who have downloaded the data on or after the 19th May 2016 (Wave1_V6.0, Wave2_V3.0, Wave3_V2.0 and Wave1_V6.0) and have made use of the w’x’_pweight and the w`x’_wgt variables, re-run their analysis.

Wave 5 implementation has been awarded to SALDRU at the University of Cape Town. Here at SALDRU, we are delighted to be again undertaking this important study on behalf of the Department of Planning Monitoring and Evaluation. We intend to be in the field later this year and target a wave 5 data release by third quarter 2018. We hope this data release will be met with as much enthusiasm and worthwhile research as we have experienced to date (for examples see our publications).

Data Releases

New versions of Wave 1, Wave 2, Wave 3 and Wave 4 are now available, including Admin Data. Data cleaning has been ongoing since the last release and new variables have been added. Please download the latest data. The data sets are available in Stata format only. Previously, the data was made available in R, SAS and SPSS. However all these programs now have a functionality to import Stata files.

NIDS data is hosted through the DataFirst portal based at the University of Cape Town. Clicking on a dataset link below will take you to the relevant page on the DataFirst portal. Once there, to download the data click on the "Get Microdata" tab.

Note: First time users will be requested to register before downloading (please ensure to read the terms of use). After registration you will simply need to log in when downloading data. See the "how to register' video by clicking below: